James Winters

📣 Very happy to announce a new BBS target article with Nick Chater in which we propose a new theory of cultural evolution, highlighting the importance of bottom-up social interaction in explaining the emergence of cultural complexity
🧵 1/8

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Belief as explanation: a motivation-based theory of agency and anthropomorphism in religious belief Supernatural agent beliefs are ubiquitous across cultures, yet many theories aimed at explaining this fact have not held up to scrutiny. The most famous of these, the Hyperactive Agency Detection D...

1/ 🎙️ New paper by Dr Aiyana Willard argues it’s time to retire HADD = “we’re hardwired to see agents EVERYWHERE” and replace it with something that *actually* fits the evidence 🪦➡️📚

@brunelpsy.bsky.social

🔗 Read it 👇

YouTube video by Gender Diversity Across Cultures Testing Biological Evolutionary Patterns Amongst Muxes: A Chat with Dr. Francisco Gómez Jiménez

🧵 1/ Excited to share this work from CCEs Francisco Gómez Jiménez, whose research explores gender diversity across cultures 🌍

Francisco introduces the muxes of the Istmo Zapotec community in Oaxaca, Mexico - a remarkable example of longstanding, culturally grounded gender diversity 🏳️‍🌈
🎥👇

Wow! I have to say that this is where the @elife.bsky.social model really shines. Super interesting paper that makes a very strong claim. Reviewers feel interpretation goes beyond what the results show. Paper published with both sides. We all benefit much more than just a publish or reject. Bravo!

Only 4 days left!

The deadline has been extended - there is still time to get your abstracts in to join us in Morocco!

The submission deadline for #CESRabat has been extended to 30 November

@ces2026.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social

🚨Only 2 days left to apply

🎉 New preprint: Bayesian Competence Inference guides Knowledge Attribution and Information search

If someone knows that Venus is the only planet in the Solar System that rotates clockwise, will they also know what Earth’s only natural satellite is? What about which planets have no moons at all?

How “intelligent” is a slime mold? When it solves mazes, it might not be thinking:it’s obeying physics. Our new paper with
@jordiplam.bsky.social shows how it follows a least action principle,letting physics do the job arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08531
@drmichaellevin.bsky.social @docteur-drey.bsky.social

Principal Components Analysis fails to recover phylogenetic structure in hominins Objectives Paleoanthropologists often utilize geometric morphometrics and principal components analysis (PCA) to interpret shape variation within the hominin fossil record. It is common practice to in...

Oops…“Principal components (PC) axes
identified by a PCA are not necessarily the most informative biologically. Nevertheless, paleoanthropologists frequently interpret proximity in PC space as indicative of morphological and thus evolutionary affinity or relatedness”

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 New paper on ArXiv:

“Uncertainty quantification and posterior sampling for network reconstruction”

TL;DR; We present an efficient method to sample the entire ensemble of possible network reconstructions that are compatible with an indirect observation, e.g. a dynamics.

Short thread: 1/N

Is #innovation born or made? Why do some places keep innovating while others fall behind? Is innovation the product of cities—or of deeper laws?

Our new paper in npj Complexity explores these questions through the lens of a century of US patent data.🧵👇
nature.com/articles/s44...

Spoiler alert: it's better to have a good theoretical understanding and design appropriate statistical models than it is to throw zillions of superficially "okay, fine" models at a poorly specified (and often deliberately vague) target.

A bit of good thinking >>> lots of poor thinking.

Shocking!

Paper in Language and Cognition with @marktorrance.bsky.social and @seriousstats.bsky.social

We show that semantic contrast shapes timing of pre-planning in speech and writing.

doi.org/10.1017/lang...

If you're into how context shapes how we plan language, check it out!

UPDATE! 🎉

Cognitations has been awarded a Workshop Event Grant by @ehbea.bsky.social

This amazing grant will help us record new episodes with leading international experts in evolution, anthro & cog sci. Stay tuned in to hear from @manvir.bsky.social, @dansperber.bsky.social & many more!!!

I haven’t read all the articles in this special issue on bases in numeration systems yet, but the ones I have read are excellent. royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/cur...

Vincent Knight, Owen Campbell, Marc Harper, T. J. Gaffney, Nikoleta E. Glynatsi
Reviving, reproducing, and revisiting Axelrod's second tournament
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15438

How do humans keep inventing tools and technologies that no single person could create alone?

Our new preprint, led by
@anilyaman.bsky.social & @ts-brain.bsky.social
shows that semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution. 🧠📘 arxiv.org/abs/2510.12837

Agreed! It was one of my 5 recommended books on cultural evolution here:
shepherd.com/best-books/c...

A Culture of Growth Why Enlightenment culture sparked the Industrial Revolution

My favourite book by Mokyr is A Culture of Growth: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb.... Here, Mokyr draws on cultural evolutionary theory to develop some his key ideas about the evolution of science, technology and the origins of modern economic growth. Really accessible and packed with ideas!

Age of Invention: Joel Mokyr's Nobel A triumph for history and the importance of ideas

It was cool to see that Mokyr got the Nobel in economics. @antonhowes.bsky.social has a nice write up here: www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-inv...

🚨New Preprint: We develop a novel task that probes counterfactual thinking without using counterfactual language, and that teases apart genuine counterfactual thinking from related forms of thinking. Using this task, we find that the ability for counterfactual thinking emerges around 5 years of age.

Swipe up to try a new variant on Conway's Game of Life. And another. And another. This is how artificial-life researchers spread the joy after the #ALIFE2025 conference! They say it's like TikTok, but I wouldn't know.... ⚙️🧫 rulehunt.org?rulesetHex=7... #cellularautomata #gameoflife

The Innovation Game: How Arcade Genres Evolve, Imitate, and Collapse « News# « Cambridge Core Blog What can Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Mortal Kombat teach us about cultural evolution? In shopping malls of the 1970s, arcades were where people played digital games together, huddled around custom-bu...

The Innovation Game: How Arcade Genres Evolve, Imitate, and Collapse
www.cambridge.org/core/blog/20... @blaividiella.bsky.social @andrejpaleo.bsky.social

Bayesian analyses of radiocarbon dates suggest multiple origins of ceramic technology in Early Holocene Africa Nature Communications - Several possible points of origin have been proposed for the spread of ceramic technology in Saharan Africa between 11–10,000 years ago. Here, the authors...

⚠️Paper Alert!⚠️
Excited to share this paper with @roccoro.bsky.social where we examined whether ceramic technology in Saharan Africa was the result of a single or multiple episodes of innovation & diffusion
rdcu.be/eJi3g

🧵 1/ New paper from CCEs @rebeccasear.bsky.social led by @hggaddy.bsky.social with @anthrolog.bsky.social challenging some common assumptions about polygyny (there are many…)

it's open access 🔓 🧪 @brunelpsy.bsky.social

Table 1 Core reasoning issues (first column), which we name after the relevant numbered section, are characterised using a plausible quote. In the second column are responses per row; also see the named section for further reading, context, and explanations. See paper for full details: ** Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

🌟 New preprint 🌟, by @olivia.science and me:

📝 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025). *Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists*. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🧪

For me this is a hard red line in psychological science. If you advocate the use of "silicon samples" you do not understand what it is we're supposed to be doing (and likely don't understand LLMs, or are a grifter). Luckily I haven't seen much of this among people I'd consider my peer group.

The end of radical concept nativism Though humans seem to be remarkable learners, arguments in cognitive science and philosophy of mind have long maintained that learning something fundamentally new is impossible. Specifically, Jerry Fo...

A paper by Josh Rule from my lab providing some formal tools for how to think about innateness -- and trying to pinpoint exactly why Fodor's claims that everything is innate is nonsense.

arxiv.org/abs/2505.18277